21 November 2009

Nothing To See Here

Human beings are weird.

Last night I was walking back to the parking garage after a huge gathering for Catholic youth at the Sprint Center in downtown KC, MO. 18,000 high school students packed into a dome right in the middle of the up-and-coming, revitalized downtown, with another several thousand connected through video link over at the convention center down the street. They were caught up in a frenzy of light shows, music, dance-skits, and a pretty stirring talk on chastity by Jason Evert and his wife. There were some pretty good points made about Christian virtue, modesty, and the hypersexualization of our culture, in such a way that they really did get across.

As if in this world one could EVER find a place in which to render oneself sexually neutral. There was a time when dressing as a child might have done that; now, it's a fixture of the porn industry that the women are to appear as young as possible. Few would argue that the line between "adult entertainment" and "abuse" is clear anymore.

Mingling men’s and women’s clothing, others argue, is like waving a flag of neutrality. “It’s a way of breaking down sexualized relationships, of getting people to relax,” said Piper Marshall, 24, who is an assistant art curator at the Swiss Institute in Manhattan. “I work with lots of male artists,” she added. “It’s important to find a common ground.”